Copyright and Creative Practice

This article examines how statutory copyright protection initially proved a doubled-edged sword for painters in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. On the one hand, the 1870 Copyright Act granted them greater control over the reproduction of their work, an advantageous economic privilege. However, it also subjected paintings to a range of rules that threatened the visual integrity and status of their work. Chief among these was the notification requirement, which obliged artists to inscribe their works with a standard notice that included the name of the rights holder and the date (e.g., “Copyright 2023 Katherine Mintie”). Through an examination of cases regarding the applicability of the notification requirement to paintings, this article shows how the law came to accommodate the growing appreciation, both cultural and economic, of paintings in the early twentieth century and contributed to attitudes about cultural hierarchies that persist to this day.